


recessional in rain

by pipistrelle



Series: Ancient Greek Word of the Day [4]
Category: Xena: Warrior Princess
Genre: Angst and Fluff, F/F, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Past Lives, Reincarnation, future lives, kind of, post “Between The Lines”
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:06:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21649519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: Ombrocharēs: delighting in rain. Three moments of calm in the midst of the storm.
Relationships: Gabrielle/Xena, Janice Covington/Melinda Pappas, Mattie Merrill/Harry O’Casey
Series: Ancient Greek Word of the Day [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1536460
Comments: 5
Kudos: 33





	recessional in rain

**Author's Note:**

> Original prompt taken with permission from terpsikeraunos on tumblr, who is very kind and in no way affiliated with any of this nonsense. 
> 
> It got away from me a bit.

  
**Ancient Greek Word of the Day: ὀμβροχαρής (ombrocharēs), delighting in rain**

_Who are you, the stranger in the shell of a lover,_   
_Dark curtains drawn by the passage of time?_   
_Oh, words, like rain, how sweet the sound._   
_"Well anyway, " she says, "I'll see you around..."  
_

-Vienna Teng, _Recessional_

III.

It’s a dark and stormy night. Harry sits down with Mattie to watch some complicated tangle of storylines on HBO and wakes up to the plaintive powering-down whine of the TV and a warm, patchouli-scented weight pinning him to the couch. 

“Power’s out,” he murmurs. 

Mattie groans. Usually she’s furious with him for falling asleep during the movies she picks, but this time she was more than half asleep herself, probably just at the point where she was about to start drooling on his shirt. She’s exhausted; they both are. The last few weeks have been as demanding as pushing a boulder up an infinite hill, and about as rewarding. (He’d comment on it, but if he does Mattie will make him put five dollars into the old peanut butter jar labelled ANCIENT GREECE that they keep next to the toaster oven. So far this month she’s put in twice as much money as he has, and he’d like to keep it that way.)

Instead he stretches and says, “Thank God. Will you just admit that you thought it was _Steel_ Magnolias and let us move on with our lives?”

”Shh!” Mattie smacks his arm. She’s gone from slack and sleepy to rapt and tense, leaning forward, listening.

Between one breath and the next something inside of Harry stretches and wakes. It uncoils all at once into his shoulders and hands, wraps cold steel cables around his stomach and sharpens every nerve-ending into readiness. He’s always had it, this heightened awareness under tension. Until a crazed sham receptionist tied him to a bomb, he’d thought everyone had it. Now he imagines Xena standing inside his skin, slipping him on like a suit of armor, flexing his hands and filling his lungs in readiness for her battle cry.

Even listening with Xena’s acuity, he can’t hear anything out of the ordinary. Just the patter of the rain, and the gurgle of that gutter he’s been meaning to unclog over the garage. The whistle of the wind. The occasional long, low scrape of branches against the front windows; those need to be pruned. He’ll get out there with shears the next warm weekend…

“This is it,” Mattie whispers. “It’s time.”

“Time for what?” Harry whispers back, but then he hears it. A suspicious scuffle, a heavy tread of boots on the drive outside. 

He’s halfway to his feet, reaching for a chakram that isn’t there, when the doorbell clangs abruptly into the weighty hush. They both jump. “The Chinese food guy,” Harry says, relaxing as he remembers. 

“Go get it,” his fiancée commands, and Harry obediently trudges off to brave the darkened hall, unthinkingly avoiding the place where the floorboards creak. 

He slips an extra ten bucks to the rain-soaked delivery guy and stops in the kitchen to pull a few beers out of the rapidly-warming fridge. Thankfully there’s almost nothing else in there apart from ketchup, a 24-pack of batteries, and half an avocado. Hence the tradition of Thursday takeout and movie night. (They get takeout a lot of Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays too, but Thursday is a tradition.)

By the time he gets back Mattie’s lit a handful of bulky aromatherapy candles from the junk drawer under the TV, creating a little pool of fluttering light. As she rearranges herself into lotus position on the couch, Harry sees the deck of cards in her hands.

“Babe,” she says seriously, “I think the universe is trying to tell us something.” 

Harry starts unloading cartons onto the coffee table. “It’s telling me not to order from this place again. They always forget the extra fried rice.”

Mattie rolls her eyes at his willful ignorance of all matters beyond the immediately material. “I’m serious! I’ve been getting this really weird feeling a lot lately. I mean, ever since we met I’ve obviously been more attuned to the spiritual depths of the cosmos, but in the last couple of weeks I’m talking, like, serious oogy-woogies. Like someone’s trying to reach me, you know? Trying to break through the barriers. And storms are a time of great power, when the forces of nature are abroad in the spiritual and material realms. In their clash and battle, there is wisdom for those brave enough to seek it.”

She’s got on her reading glasses, the round ones with green-tinged lenses. They remind Harry irresistibly of Woodstock, but sometimes, at the right angle, there’s a shine to them that suggests sea-glass, the reflection of dim light from great depths. The whimsical silk shawl she used to wear for hypnosis sessions flutters around her shoulders, dancing in a draft from the living room window as though tugged by invisible hands. For a moment she looks deeply, improbably mystical; as though she could reach with her imperious manner and manicured nails past the veils of space and time, and pluck the fruit from which is drawn the nectar of the gods.

Then she smiles like a saint and shuffles the deck like a crooked dealer in a back-alley poker game. He loves her so much he can hardly breathe. 

“And it’s auspicious, to consult the oracles before important occasions,” she adds. “Here, hold the cards.”

For flimsy cardboard, the deck is oddly weighty in his hands. As Mattie digs into the General Tso’s chicken, Harry flips the deck over to look at the bottom card and sees a familiar figure staring back at him: pale hatchet-nosed face, pointy elbows and awkwardly large ears, skinny chest barely holding up a breastplate dangling from one shoulder strap, goofy helmet under one arm. Printed above his head is THE FOOL.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Harry groans. “Where on Earth did you find a Xena tarot?”

The next card under THE FOOL shows a dashing goateed man in red, with a golden circlet and half-cape, raising a sword: THE HIEROPHANT. Under that is TEMPERANCE, a thin-armed young women with brown ringlets cascading over one shoulder as she kneels in prayer before a simple altar. It’s only a cheap illustration, but the space between her bowed shoulders and clasped hands evokes such fragility and strength that Harry’s heart aches just looking at it. 

Mattie says, “On the internet, obviously. Sure, it’s a cheap gimmick to capitalize on a hack show, but for us, what could be better?”

“Blackjack,” Harry suggests, moving to the next card: THE CHARIOT, an ironically unharnessed golden horse. “Or Uno. Or there’s always the old-fashioned way — how are you at reading the entrails of a chicken?”

“Hey! Careful with those! Would you get sweet and sour sauce all over Nostradamus’ crystal ball?”

Harry hands back the cards and reaches for a beer. “If Nostradamus got his ball near my wontons.”

“You’re disgusting,” Mattie says, with almost unbearable fondness. “Now shut up and open your heart to the vibrations of the other realms.” She riffles the stack one last time and lays down three cards in a neat row. “This is one of the most basic arrangements: past, present, and future. Turn the first one over.”

The first card is the THE LOVERS: Xena and Gabrielle in profile against a sky washed with the delicate pinks of sunrise or sunset, their hands clasped together between them and heads bowed, dark over fair. Harry groans. “Come on, that’s too easy. Tell the universe to tell us something we don’t know.”

“All right, next one.” The middle card is a chakram etched with alchemical symbols, silver and gold entwined on a flat black field emblazoned with WHEEL OF FORTUNE. “Change and recurrence,” Mattie says. “Karma and cycles. What goes around, comes around. That’s the present.”

“No surprises so far. Guess I’ll buy a vowel.” Harry reaches for the third card. This one has no words, only a picture of a ramshackle wooden house in a bright green pasture, framed by little flat discs of bronze.

“That’s the Ten of Coins,” Mattie says, squinting at it over her glasses.

“Bummer. I was hoping we’d get the one with the dead guy on it. What’s this one mean?”

“How should I know? I only memorized the Major Arcana. Hang on, I’ve got a book —“

“Take a candle with you!” Harry calls as Mattie vanishes into the dark bedroom. The only answer is a thump, an expensive-sounding crash and a filthy word. 

While he waits for her to come back, he studies the card. It looks familiar, in an odd way, though the house isn’t one he’s ever seen.

“What’s this?” He asks as Mattie reappears in the doorway, clutching a battered purple hardback with a black cat on the cover. “Not the Ten of Quarters, or whatever, I mean what was it on the show?”

After a crazed war god blew her con sky-high (metaphorically) and tried to do the same to the building and hostages (literally), Mattie needed to lay low for a little while, to let the whole thing blow over. She spent the time revisiting old books on reincarnation and watching every episode of _Xena: Warrior Princess_ a few times, just to be safe. 

“Xena’s grandmother’s house,” she says absently, absorbed in flipping through pages. “The one they fixed up for Ares to live in after he lost his powers. The only home they had, after the time skip. Ah, here we go. ‘The Ten of Pentacles represents security, happiness, and fulfillment in all areas of your life. It is the reward after mighty labors.’”

“Well, that’s good. Guess we can stop worrying about ghosts ruining the wedding.” Harry carefully replaces the last card in the deck. He doesn’t believe in this stuff the way Mattie does, but he would never really have gotten sweet and sour sauce on them. Only a fool needlessly offends the Fates. 

Something in the silence draws his attention. Mattie’s clutching the book like a lifeline but isn’t looking at it. She’s staring out the window at the dark and rain, watching the dim blurred silhouettes of wind-whipped trees and passing cars with a strange, haunted look on her face.

“Babe? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Mattie snaps the book shut and tosses it carelessly on the floor, wiping at her eyes with one hand. “Nothing, I just felt —“

Harry starts to complain about her throwing stuff where they’ll trip over it later, but he can’t. His mouth is suddenly dry. His heart squeezes and thuds against his ribs, once, twice. The wind is rising outside and he can feel it inside, feeling it raking over him irresistibly, dragging him forward with a force that overpowers any mortal strength, and the wind is Time —

 _Like someone’s trying to tell me something_ , Mattie said. It feels like the random sounds of each individual raindrop combined for one split second into one sound, the sound of a gigantic voice, and it breathed one word the size of the sky, and he almost understood it.

Then it passes. Mattie’s face is pale in the candlelight and Harry’s already on his feet, reaching for her. She tucks her head under his chin with a deep sigh and sniffles a little. 

“Everything’s fine,” he murmurs into her hair. Already that weird feeling is half-forgotten, a sliver of a dream, a beat of deja vu. “The cake’s done, nobody’s plane crashed, we got a backup photographer. And the cosmos said we’re good, right? Maybe we can just relax and enjoy this.” 

“Yeah. You’re right. I just…”

“I know. Me too.” Harry steers them both back to the couch. Instinctively he craves familiar things, things to anchor them both in this century, which right now means polyester and the taste of too much MSG. TV would have been nice, but radio will do in a pinch. He thinks there’s an old battery-operated one stuffed in one of their closets, something his father gave him when he was twelve, but he can’t go look for it because Mattie snuggles up to him and wraps her arms around him like he’s a flight risk.

Or, he thinks, tangling his fingers in her hair, like she’s the one at risk of flying off. Like without him to hold onto she might come detached from the here and now, run off into the storm-washed streets with a steak knife strapped to each boot, in search of wrongs to right.

Teasing, he tickles the nape of her neck. “For Christmas we should get Xena and Gabrielle a Verizon plan. What d’you think the roaming charges are from two thousand years ago?”

She makes a little breathy sound of acknowledgement, not quite a laugh. Then she says, “It’s not fair that we get this. When they never could. After two thousand years of bullshit…”

“So we _should_ worry about ghosts ruining the wedding?”

“No,” Mattie says. “No, they gave us their blessing. We’re their happy ending.”

“I love you, babe, and that is horseshit.”

“Centaur-shit,” Mattie suggests, muffled into his shirt.

Harry pinches the back of her arm, enduring her retaliatory swat. “Jar. Fifty cents.”

As she leans over far enough to rummage on the floor for the purse she kicked under the couch hours ago, he steadies her with both hands, watching the candlelight dance in her hair. Wondering if Xena ever felt like this under some brilliant undimmed Mediterranean sun. Wondering if, between all the monsters and near-disastrous cosmic crises, she ever felt how lucky she was. How lucky they are.

Generally Harry concerns himself with the practical side of being Xena’s descendant, stuff like marrying Mattie and doing extremely cool flip-kicks that stretch the bounds of physics. He still moonlights as a vigilante, and sometimes he even still wears the costume. He’s pretty sure Xena would approve. But he _knows_ she would hate having a descendant who wastes his life by letting the deeds and misdeeds of long-dead warrior women distract him from the here and now. 

When Mattie comes back he draws her down again and kisses her, soft and slow and thorough, as though they have all the time in the world, because they do. From everlasting to everlasting. “We are _not_ their happy ending,” he says when she pulls back, face flushed above him, eyes dark and hungry. She’s got her elbows propped on the couch on either side of him, her hands on his shoulders, nails just starting to dig in, not willing to let go. 

“We aren’t anyone’s ending,” he says. “We’re just getting started.”

II.

“If I didn’t know any better,” Mel says, conversationally almost, “I’d think you woke up every morning determined to get us into as much trouble as humanly possible, and you just can’t rest at night unless you’ve had to run for your life at least twice.”

Janice doesn’t answer — which is all for the best, Mel supposes. What she needs most right now is rest.

Well, what she needs _most_ is a hospital. And after that some proper food, and a bath, and maybe some common sense. What she needs, Mel thinks, is the sense of self-preservation that the good Lord gave a cactus.

“After all,” she adds out loud, “you’ve already got the prickles.”

Janice shifts a little and mumbles, but any words are drowned in the racket of the storm. Every raindrop hits the flimsy tin roof of the truck like a steel drum, and that’s not even taking into account the high ululating howl of the wind, or the endless gurgling of the river rushing through the narrow gorge where the road used to be. Mel tries not to listen to that for too long. She can’t shake the image of that swirl of brown water eating away at its makeshift banks, crumbling the gritty soil inch by inch, until it starts sucking at the ground under the truck’s tires. She can imagine vividly what it’ll feel like: first the gradual tip, then the rocking, and finally the topple down into the torrent with a splash no one will hear. She can’t decide whether they’ll sink like a stone or be carried along a ways. Maybe they’ll be dragged until the chassis lodges in some narrow canyon and they perish there, a thousand miles from another Christian soul, where some farmer leading his donkey to market will find their bones, come spring.

“It’d serve you right,” she says to Janice. “But it wouldn’t serve me right, and where’s the justice in that?”

Janice groans a little. She’s as comfortable as Mel could make her, laid out in the backseat, with Janice’s own ragged coat balled up under her head for a pillow and Mel’s coat spread overtop of her. Both coats are still damp from having been soaked through, and with more than just rain. Part of the reason Janice’s coat is wadded up out of sight is so Mel doesn’t have to look at the blotchy rusting-brown stain over the shoulder and the hole where the bullet ripped through.

Mel patched the wound as best she could, once they got out of the Obsidian King’s tomb and away from Dr. Goetzfeld and his men. Janice had driven them out of there, of course, cursing a blue streak about _grave robbers_ and _black-hearted jackals_ and _we left those damn leeches behind in Calcutta, how’d they get here_ and who knew what else. She didn’t even notice she’d been shot until Mel grabbed the wheel out of her hands and pulled them over to the side of the road, just in time for Janice to mumble some nonsense about being fine and slump over against the window. Then the rain and thunder started.

Janice has woken up once or twice since then, mostly to curse at Dr. Goetzfeld, and the Obsidian King, and her father (bless his ornery soul), and Heaven, and Hell. But not at Mel, which is a nice change.

She’s sleeping now at last, real sleep, though unrestful. Her face is the color of week-old milk, and she grimaces now and then as pain moves under her skin like some leviathan moving through dark water under a thick sheet of ice. Mel’s no doctor, but she knows that Janice has lost a great deal more blood than is good for her. And Mel’s never before in her life felt the kind of heartbreak she feels now, seeing Janice in so much pain. 

“I’d take it for you,” she says, because it’s true, and because she’s gotten more into the habit of this than she’d like to admit — of saying true things to Janice while she’s asleep, things that Janice would bite her head off for if she said them during daylight. But she likes to say them, and she likes to think that Janice hears her, somewhere deep down. 

Janice’s eyes flutter open. In the gloom, the blue of them is almost black. “Mel? Wh’re we?” 

“About an hour west of that tomb. A storm kicked up — road’s washed out ahead, and Goetzfeld’s goons will get us if we go back. But it’ll clear by morning, and we can find a way around. There’s got to be doctors in the capital, they’ll fix you up.”

Janice’s face flushes with effort as she struggles to raise herself on her good arm. Her gritted teeth flash white in the gloom. Mel pushes her back down. “Janice Covington, don’t you dare try to move! If you tear that shoulder open again —“

“‘M fine,” Janice barks. It might have been intimidating, if her voice had any strength to it, but it’s as weak as the rest of her. “That shot just grazed me. Lemme up, I c’n drive —“

“I would sooner get out and push this truck to Cairo with one hand tied behind my back than let you drive it. We’d get there a damn sight faster!”

A smile tugs at the corners of Janice’s mouth, faint and mocking.

“What now?” Mel demands.

“You said ‘damn’,” she mutters. “You must really be worried about me.”

She says it almost triumphantly, with a sneer. Like she’s won some kind of game, pulled one over on Mel by tricking her into caring. With an effort Mel bridles her instinctive anger, stamps down on the urge to yell _Of course I’m worried! I love you and you might be dying!_ Because Janice isn’t dying, can’t be dying, because she has so much work to do still, and because — well, she doesn’t know how Janice will react to hearing Mel say _I love you_ , but it’s not a conversation she wants to have when they’re cooped up in the truck in the middle of nowhere and Janice can barely keep her own head up. Mel highly doubts that particular conversation is one that Janice will be able to handle meekly. She’s going to want to shout about it, and she deserves a chance to. It can wait til she’s well.

What Mel says instead is, “Of course I’m worried. No matter what you might think about me, Janice Covington, it gives me no joy to see you suffer. Even if you did get us into this mess in the first place.”

Janice grins, and Mel is unaccountably relieved to see the old fierce glint back in her eye. “Wish that jackal had aimed for my head. Bullet woulda bounced right off.”

Before she can stop herself, Mel reaches out and smooths back a sweat-soaked lock of hair, gritty with grave-dust, from Janice’s clammy forehead. “Hard as it may be — hard as diamond, I’d say — I like your head attached to your shoulders,” she sighs. “Now, don’t fall asleep on me yet. I’ve got to change this.” 

Twisting awkwardly around to reach from the front seat, Mel slips her fingers into the warm hollow between Janice’s collarbone and the coat covering her modesty. The wad of cloth pressed to her shoulder used to be Mel’s second-to-last spare shirt, and a pristine white, but now it’s stained a vivid nauseating scarlet. Mel yanks it free with one swift jerk. Janice clamps her teeth down on an undoubtedly filthy string of curses.

“It’s all right, you know,” Mel says, deliberately light, as she rummages under the seat for her bag and the last clean shirt either of them has. It’s quick work to fold it up into a square that can be pressed to that ugly matted scab. The bleeding’s slowed enough that it might even last until morning. “You can call me whatever you like, no need to protect me from your deplorable manners. I know full well you don’t care one whit for how a lady’s s’posed to be treated, so you may as well get some joy out of callin’ me names. Won’t be the first time or the last.”

It might be the flicker of lightning over the hills, but Mel imagines that for a moment the expression on Janice’s face changes — still a grimace of pain, but a different kind of pain. “Don’t know what you’re…talking about.”

Mel holds pressure. Janice’s skin is warm under her fingertips, and the curve of her collarbone looks strangely vulnerable. Maybe because it’s the only part of her Mel’s ever seen that isn’t covered in dirt, or calloused from regular use in digging or fighting. “Course you do,” she says. “How about insulting my driving? That should perk you right up. Go on, say it. If I’d left you at the wheel we’d probably be there already, and you’d be halfway through a steak dinner instead of trapped in this tin can with me yammering at you.”

“No steaks this far out.” Janice’s eyes are closed, her face sallow. Another flicker of lightning makes her features seem translucent for half a second, suffused with light. “And I suppose it ain’t so bad, being stuck here. Could be worse.”

Mel snorts. She presses one hand to Janice’s cheek, and fights the urge to leave it there, knowing Janice is as likely as not to bite it off. “You’re delirious.”

“Nah. R’mind me to tell you about the time my Pa took me to Toledo. You’re much better company than a gang of Hell’s Angels and five kegs of moonshine.” In a lower, softer voice, she says, “Being stuck’s not so bad, if it’s with you.” 

Janice’s breathing, which Mel has been listening to over the low roar of the storm, catches on a gasp, and in a sudden flash of lightning Mel sees that her eyes are wide. She’s gone pale again. “Janice,” Mel says, worry leaping all at once to panic. “Janice, stay with me now, you hear?”

“Yes,” Janice says, low in her throat, without the slightest edge to it at all, none of her usual barking and posturing and aggression. If Mel didn’t know better she’d have called it soft. “Don’t you worry your…pretty little head. ‘M not goin’ anywhere.”

“Make that a promise,” Mel says, as wry as she can. Showing how upset she is will only upset Janice and make things worse. “It would comfort me ever so much. Seeing as you’re a scientist, and not some common grave robber, I know you’d never break your word.”

“Promise,” Janice says, with some effort. Her eyes drift closed, but she claws her way back to wakefulness. Peering up into Mel’s face, she frowns suddenly. “Are you crying?”

“Course not,” Mel says, though she doesn’t try hard to hide it. She only clasps Janice’s good hand in hers. For no reason she can discern, it suddenly strikes her that the rain drumming on the roof of the truck sounds like the fall of hundreds of hammers.

“Don’t cry,” Janice says, and her voice is soft again, hoarse and strange, almost tender. “I’ll be all right. You’ll see. I’m tougher’n a mule. You’ll be stuck with me for… a long time…”

She’s fading. “It’s all right, get some rest,” Mel tells her. She expects the hand in hers to go slack, but if anything it clenches tighter as Janice’s eyes close and her breathing evens out again. Thunder rolls wide across the desert. 

_The Lord weeps_ , Mel thinks, and meets the thought with a fierceness that would make Janice proud. There’s no cause for weeping, not yet, and not for a long while. Janice gave her word, and while in many ways she’s more a scoundrel than Mel ever thought to find herself running in company with, she’s also as honorable in her odd way as the knights of Camelot. And she doesn’t promise what she can’t deliver. 

I.

“I wonder how long it’ll go on.”

“Couple hours,” Xena says absently. “These storms are common this time of year. But the road will be washed out up ahead. We’ll spend the night here and move on in the morning.”

“I didn’t mean the rain.” Gabrielle settled without thinking into lotus position, but she’s too skittish for true meditation, too full of pent-up energy. The storm caught them in the open, forced them to slog for a muddy half-mile back over hills they’d already crossed to find a cave to camp in, but now that they’re safe and starting to dry out, Gabrielle can see how beautiful it is. _Monsoon_ , dangerous and beautiful at once, like so much else in this country. The sheets of rain transform the landscape utterly; like folds of billowing gray silk, yet with a violence that turns a sleepy, pastoral, almost lifeless stretch of fields into a thing of wild motion as restless and dynamic as the sea. But, she thinks, the hills themselves don’t change.

Her left hand rests on her left knee, but without noticing she runs her right one nervously through her newly-shortened hair, rubbing the place at the back of her neck where she’s still not used to feeling the cold breeze.

“We were lucky. Nothing got soaked that won’t dry out. Your scrolls made it.” Xena comes to join her at the cave mouth, squinting out into the sheets of falling water, trying to see in it whatever Gabrielle sees. “Dinar for your thoughts,” she says, quietly, an offer rather than a demand. 

There’s only one thing Gabrielle could be thinking about, so soon after their battle with Alti for the war-torn future. They haven’t talked about it since they left the city. Even now, Gabrielle can tell that Xena would rather avoid it. But there’s no avoiding what is destined, and for all her faults Xena’s never lacked courage.

“Come here,” Gabrielle says, “and I’ll show you.”

Wary but willing, Xena settles in lotus position just close enough that their knees brush together. She closes her eyes for a meditative breath, then opens them again with a _Mmmph_ of surprise as Gabrielle turns and twists herself into Xena’s lap and kisses her with the pent-up passion of three days’ musings on fate and fortune, the haste of mortality warring with the leisure of lifetimes. The rigid discipline of Xena’s posture unfolds, the lotus blossoming from bud to flower, as Xena’s hands run up the backs of Gabrielle’s thighs. 

Gabrielle’s reaching for the soaked leather straps of Xena’s breastplate, but before she can get at the knots Xena slows, cools, rests one forestaying hand at Gabrielle’s hip and cups her cheek in the other. “You’re not…” she says, her voice hoarse and heavy.

Gabrielle grasps her hand, kisses the rough calluses. “I’m not what?”

“Afraid. I thought you would be. Now that you’ve seen it for yourself.”

“How could I be? I’ve just been shown that we’ll be together in other times, in other lands, that our karma can’t be separated. How can I be afraid of the ending of this life, when I know there’s so much beyond it?”

“I should have known,” Xena says, half laughing, still not free of grief. “You were like this in the other life, too. Shakti was, even before Naima sent you after me. To save his people he faced his own death without a moment’s fear.”

“You make me brave,” Gabrielle says simply. “That’s how I’ll know you, every time we meet.”

“No.” It’s harsh and immediate, softened only by how vulnerable Xena seems, the way she bends her head to press her lips to Gabrielle’s shoulder. “No, Gabrielle, that bravery has always been yours. All I ever did was see it.”

“Then we’ll need something else, since when we’re reborn our feet will probably look different. It was a good idea,” she adds as Xena raises an eyebrow. “But I didn’t see a cross on Arminestra’s feet, or Shakti’s.”

“All right.” Xena lazily strokes Gabrielle’s thigh from hip to knee, thinking, or pretending to. “Will you always eat like a horse and snore like a waterfall?”

Gabrielle shivers at her touch. “I don’t know. Will _you_ always have to ruin the moment?”

Xena’s smile at that is so indolent and wicked, it’s hard to believe she’ll ever be a saint, even having seen it with her own eyes. “Yes. That’s how you’ll know me.” 

In retaliation Gabrielle shifts her weight in a way she knows will drive Xena crazy, and is rewarded by a hitch in Xena’s breath, a soft sound of impatient and impetuous desire. 

Later, in the hush of their breathing and the roar of the storm, collapsed and more than half-asleep in the pile of damp furs, Xena murmurs into the skin above her collarbone, “Not that I’m complaining, but what about fighting a war in the future made you...react like this?”

“Our souls will be together, but our bodies will be different. And that got me thinking about this body,” rolling over to rake her fingernails gently across Xena’s bare stomach between painted arcs and whorls, sending shivers from her solar plexus to the soles of her feet, “and how much I’ll miss it.” 

“Yours isn’t so bad either,” Xena murmurs, a very gratifying weakness in her voice.

“Is that how you’ll know me? By my beauty? I might be the next Helen of Troy. Or the next Hector.”

Too exposed, too stripped raw for any pretense or defenses, Xena says, “You give me hope. Something to fight for.”

They lay for a moment in the hush under roar of the rain. “Maybe someday we won’t have to fight. The stories say that souls remain on the wheel of rebirth until they reach Nirvana. You’ll be a saint. You could reach it very soon, and be able to be free of the cycle.”

Xena says “Not without you,” with a certainty against which all the gods and cosmic powers might dash themselves in vain.

“No. Wherever we go, we’ll go together.” Gabrielle tangles her legs with Xena’s, thinking of all the years she spent in Potedaia before they met, the years she’ll spend in her next life, looking for something she can hardly imagine, for someone undreamt of but necessary. How it was worth it, will all be worth it again.

The furs are heavy and warm, and she’s engulfed in the scent of Xena’s hair, of mud and rain and henna. What dim light reached them before through the bruise-black clouds is failing, and as the storm roars outside with unabated fury she imagines the waters rising, changing the surface but not the shape of things.

**Author's Note:**

> A NOTE FOR THOSE KNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT TAROT:
> 
> I consulted a friend for some of the card meanings, but then twisted them to suit my own means. If they are hilariously inappropriate and/or wrong, think but this and all is mended: a) the people creating this product in-universe are probably doing it only an exploitative gimmick and are not as loving or knowledgeable as fans of the show would be, and b) I feel it to be perfectly consistent with Mattie’s sham-spiritual character that she be awful at Tarot readings (but think she’s great at them). That said, if any grievous error of mine offends you, I shall try to remedy it.


End file.
